Origin of Species Adventure

Day 1 · Yacht La Pinta

Into the islands at Baltra

The flight from the mainland lands on Baltra, a flat scrub island that was an American airbase in the 1940s and is now the archipelago's gateway. Park formalities and the transit-card check are done inside the terminal, and the crossing to the ship goes from there: nobody stays on Baltra, which has no town and nothing to see.

The highlands are the wet side of Santa Cruz, green and misty where the coast is dry, and giant tortoises climb up into them to graze on private farmland that has simply left them to it. The same slope is riddled with lava tunnels, one of them wide enough to walk through upright for several hundred yards.

Day 2 · Yacht La Pinta

Eden Islet

Eden Islet is a tuff cone broken open on one side, and the visit stays on the water: a panga circuit under the walls where white-tipped reef sharks patrol the shallows and blue-footed boobies fold and dive around the boat. Golden rays cross the sand below in numbers.

Chinese Hat is a small cone off the coast of Santiago, named for its shape seen from the water, and the channel between the two islands is the reason to come. Galapagos penguins fish it, the snorkeling runs over reef sharks and eagle rays, and the crescent of white sand on the near side is backed by lava with marine iguanas holding it between swims.

Day 3 · Yacht La Pinta

Bartolome

A boardwalk of 372 steps climbs the cinder cone to the view the islands are known for: Pinnacle Rock standing between two facing half-moon bays, with spatter cones and lava fields running off behind it. The snorkeling off the beach below can put a Galapagos penguin in the water beside you, at the northern edge of where the species lives.

Sullivan Bay is a walk over bare pahoehoe lava that poured across this coast in 1897 and has been left almost exactly as it set: ropes, coils and swirls underfoot, cracked into plates, with the older cones it flowed around standing up through it. Almost nothing grows on it yet, which is what makes it readable as a single event rather than a landscape.

Day 4 · Yacht La Pinta

Darwin Bay

Darwin Bay is a drowned caldera with its seaward wall breached, so the ship anchors inside the crater itself and the seabirds have the water to themselves. The landing is coral sand backed by low salt bush holding nesting frigatebirds and red-footed boobies close enough to watch without a lens, and the cliff wall that rings the anchorage drops straight into clear water for snorkeling and kayaking below it.

A cleft in the crater wall, called El Barranco in Spanish for exactly that, climbs a steep natural staircase to a plain of bare lava on the rim. The ground is a nesting colony of Nazca and red-footed boobies, and storm petrels swarm over it in the thousands; the short-eared owls that hunt them do it in broad daylight here, which happens nowhere else on earth because there are no hawks on this island to compete.

Day 5

Santa Cruz to Baltra, and the flight home

Breakfast aboard, then the last disembarkation of the trip and the road north across Santa Cruz to the channel, the ferry over it and the short run to the airstrip on Baltra for the flight to the mainland.